Gift cards, loyalty cards, credit cards and other relatively flat products such as sachets of liquids, keys, coins, etc., are often attached to carrier cards or placed inside of sleeves or folded cards to allow for retail display or mailing of the products. These carrier cards, with or without attached items, are used either for promotional offers or information, or for retail sales of products.
In addition to providing for the display or mailing of products, these retail displays or mail cards protect and secure the products, educate the consumer, and visually differentiate from other consumer choices. The most favored packages in this field are those that can be differentiated, provide a useful function for protection and security, can be reused as a gift presentation, serve as an interactive method of advertising and informing, and are of a relatively low cost to manufacture.
There exist packages having a moving or sliding piece in a sleeve to provide for protection and reuse of the package, however the prior designs are difficult to produce, fill and assemble, and are too expensive for many applications. The prior products have an outer sleeve produced with an internal stop panel folded up from the bottom of the sleeve and extending all the way across the inside of the outer sleeve. An inner sliding piece is produced with an extension of the sliding piece called a stop flap that is folded under the inner sliding piece and directed downward.
In assembly, the outer sleeve is folded to have front and back panels that are secured to each other along the sides with glue on glue flaps to form a pocket with an open bottom edge. The inner sliding piece then has a gift card glued to it and the stop flap is folded over the back of the insert, and then inserted into the outer sleeve, usually by hand. The downwardly folded stop flap at the top of the inner sliding piece is intended to “hook” or interlock with the upwardly folded stop panel at the bottom of the outer sleeve when the inner sliding piece is pulled part way out of the outer sleeve. This design, however, is unreliable because the downwardly folded stop flap and upwardly folded stop panel can engage each other at their loading edges to prevent full extension of the inner piece or they can fail to engage at all, slip past each other, and the inner piece can be pulled all the way out of the outer sleeve.
The prior assembly method, therefore, is unreliable, costly, and slow, due mainly to the requirement of folding the stop flap and/or the stop panel by hand, and inserting the inner sliding piece into the sleeve by hand. This prior process would become even more complicated and uneconomical if it were attempted in the various options provided by the present invention.
Sliding packages can also be made in the form of boxes, but the complications described above, and the added steps required to make a package into a box would render the use of stop flaps and panels prohibitively expensive.
Thus, there is a need for a package with an outer sleeve and interlocked sliding piece that is reliable, useful, economical to manufacture, and adaptable to numerous package shapes and arrangements.